Native Hawaiians share the most Polynesian ancestry with the people of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, according to a new genetic analysis of over 1,000 Polynesian people. The study found the populations were closely related, challenging assumptions about how the most remote inhabited island chain on Earth came to be populated. Researchers date the connection to the 1200s.
The findings, published as the cover story of the journal Science on October 8, come from a team of 13 researchers at institutions including Stanford University and UC San Diego, according to Medievalists.net. As Reuters reports, the people who first settled Easter Island had themselves arrived from Mangareva in French Polynesia, more than 1,500 miles away, in that same century. The study also found that Native Hawaiians and Rapa Nui were closely related.
Stanford computational geneticist Alexander Ioannidis, a co-senior author of the study, said algorithms were able to identify perfectly matching DNA sequences between people on different islands and use them to build island-by-island family trees, per Reuters. Those trees paired Hawaii and Rapa Nui together in 61% of 2,500 reconstructed family trees. Keolu Fox, a University of California, San Diego genome scientist and the study's other co-senior author, said the team was so stunned by the result that they checked it four separate ways before trusting it, Reuters reports.
Tracing the Ocean Family Tree
The research included genetic data from 317 Native Hawaiians, 12 Rapa Nui and 8 Mangarevans, alongside people from the Society, Tuamotu, Marquesas, Austral, Samoan and Tongan islands, according to Reuters. Beyond their link to Easter Island, Native Hawaiians carry their second-largest ancestry contribution from Mangareva, a island located nearly 3,000 kilometers west of Rapa Nui, as detailed by SciTechDaily.
Researchers have dubbed this voyaging population holomoana nui, Hawaiian for great ocean voyaging, the Reuters report notes. Fox described Polynesians as the greatest voyaging community in human history, noting they explored and settled the Pacific centuries before Europeans' more celebrated expeditions. The canoes that made these journeys carried bananas, taro, sweet potato and chickens to the islands they reached, a detail of daily survival that underscores just how deliberate — not accidental — these migrations were.
The study builds on earlier genetic work from the same team that had only been able to trace Polynesian settlement as far as Easter Island. This new analysis added genomic data from Tahiti in the Society Islands, where researchers estimated a founding population of roughly 837 reproductive-age individuals arrived around AD 1069, according to Medievalists.net. Ioannidis said Hawaii's founding population was expected to be no larger, and likely smaller, than Tahiti's, since the voyage to Hawaii was considerably longer, per Reuters.
A Genetic Alarm Bell for Modern Hawaii
Those ancient, repeated bottlenecks — small founding groups settling island after island — left a modern genetic fingerprint. Stanford Medicine reports that researchers identified three specific gene mutations present in 2% to 3% of Eastern Polynesians: variants in the FAN1, ADAMTSL4 and PDE6B genes, linked respectively to kidney failure, dislocated eye lenses and progressive vision loss. These variants are nearly absent from global genomic databases, meaning they were essentially invisible to medicine until now.
The scale of these founder effects dwarfs anything seen in the populations medical genetics has traditionally studied. According to SciTechDaily, the cumulative founder effects experienced by Eastern Polynesians were more than ten times larger than those documented in heavily studied European founder groups like the Amish, Finns and Ashkenazi Jews. Those groups have received standard screenings for certain genetic conditions, per Reuters, while Native Hawaiians — a population nearly twice the size of the U.S. Amish population — currently lack standard clinical genetic screening guidelines or insurance reimbursement for the rare inherited conditions tied to their ancestral lineage, Stanford Medicine notes.
Ioannidis has emphasized the urgent need for dedicated clinical research resources in Hawaii, according to the same Stanford Medicine report. Fox, in comments to Reuters, said researchers identified kidney disease- and blindness-linked variants at surprisingly high frequencies in French Polynesia — carrier rates that, at 2% to 3%, meet standard clinical thresholds where preventive genetic screening is typically recommended elsewhere in the world.
Oral Tradition Meets Genomic Proof
The genomic findings arrive decades after Hawaiian wayfinders tried to prove this very connection through lived experience rather than lab work. During the voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa's 2017 visit to Rapa Nui, Hawaiian navigator Nainoa Thompson observed local elders welcome the crew with a traditional chant, or ʻoli, that accurately named specific landforms and mountains on Maui — a moment Civil Beat describes as oral tradition preserving trans-oceanic connections across centuries.
Researchers isolated genome-wide segments of Polynesian origin from more than 1,000 modern Pacific individuals, computationally filtering out more recent European and Asian admixture to reconstruct these ancient lineages, Stanford Medicine reports. Hawaii remains the only Polynesian island in the Northern Hemisphere, separated from Easter Island by roughly 7,000 kilometers — a distance comparable to the gap between San Francisco and Lima, Peru, according to the same Stanford account. Native Hawaiians and Easter Islanders also share a similar Austronesian language and food traditions, Reuters notes, reinforcing the genetic trail with cultural evidence.
The team's earlier work, a 2020 study led by Ioannidis and published in Nature, had already shown that ancient Polynesians encountered and mixed with Native Americans from coastal Ecuador and Colombia around 1200 CE — explaining how South American crops like the sweet potato entered Polynesia before European contact. Taken together, the findings paint a picture of Pacific voyagers who were mapping an ocean the size of two continents, one island family tree at a time, while leaving behind a genetic legacy that modern healthcare systems have yet to catch up with.
